Contemporary sociolinguistic scholarship takes it as axiomatic that the world is multilingual. The conceptual shift toward multilingualism has not been predicated on any prior philosophical analysis of the ‘natures’ of language ( Hauck & Heurich 2018) or any systematic enquiry into the questions of which type of, and whose, multilingualisms with which we are dealing. There are two emerging trends in sociolinguistics, but neither addresses the epistemologies and indigenous ontologies of language that are necessary in an analysis of multilingualisms. The first trend avoids the use of the notion of language or languages through frameworks such as ‘languaging’, discourse and community or performance and discourse: the second may seek to expand our horizons of linguistic communication through terms such as multimodality, semiotic systems, and gestures but may, at the s ame time , maintain a commitment to languages as identifiable enumerable entities as illustrated in the variants of research on multimodality based on systemic functional grammar. Neither approach addresses the underlying question of the epistemologies and ontologies of language. In this presentation I seek to address the underlying notion of southern multilingualisms by drawing on assemblages of southern epistemologies and indigenous ontologies based on metaphors complemented with indigenous cosmologies, ubuntu-nepantla, and the notion of ‘entangled electrical wires’ (Bou Ayash 2019) from sprawling urban slums. In this presentation I will illustrate the use of the term ‘lay person’ can be utilized to facilitate a decolonization of applied linguistics because modern disciplines, such as linguistics and anthropology, are viscerally tied to colonialism. By taking into account indigenous cosmovisions I can start to move away from either from both monolingual and multilin gual ori entations toward language.